The medical community notes that medication errors are a major reason for patient hospitalization, with mortality estimates sometimes reported ats accounting for over 90,000 deaths per year. Although there are numerous factors contributing to this crisis, baselines in health-related information creation, transfer, comprehension, and compliance are key elements of this problem.
In efforts to address this problem, the medical community is embracing the advancement of computer-based systems. Although these systems are moving into the forefront, they may not be fully efficient or effective and may exhibit the same problems inherent in a paper-based system, including increased user entry and retrieval time in searching for current and historical i health-related information. Both systems exhibit common problems by relying on text-based communication, which may be ambiguous, region-specific, and either partly or fully miscomprehended by people interacting with the system. These problems may be exacerbated or compounded during the transfer of health-related information among healthcare professionals, due to the lack of standardization (resulting in “re-entry” errors) and comprehension issues, where content of material and interpretation of health-related information is variable, based on organizational and cognitive abilities.
The transfer of health-related information between the medical community and the general population also continues to have serious problems, since non-standardized and often incomplete health-related information may be imperfectly “pieced together” by multiple healthcare providers and the patient to create an incorrect or incomplete medical record. This problem may also arise when health-related information (including the vehicle, route, dosage, time of day, administration, and/or use of a medication) is not easily transferred, accessed, or understood by the general population.
Improvements in the process of recording and communicating medical information, including medication regimen information, are therefore desirable.